#hymns sung in concentration camps

[dianaleaghmatthews]

Hymn Story: Lead, Kindly Light

John Henry Newman wrote a poem “The Pillar of the Cloud” in 1833. The poem was first published in the British Magazine the following year. Charles H. Purday’s “Tune” was married to the poem. It then became the hymn we know “Lead, Kindly Light.” As a young priest, Newman became sick while in Italy and was unable to travel for almost three weeks. In his own words: Father Newman Before starting…

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

i think this is a good example of the situation(tm) with spain and fascism and how it's very different to other european countries like italy or germany.

this news article says that the government pays more than 9000€ per year to mantain franco's tomb (and by the government it means, well, the taxpayers). for those who don't know, francisco franco was a fascist dictator (friend of hitler and mussolini) that ruled spain from 1939 til 1975. he died peacefully. in his bed. after 4 decades of ruling. this is one of the key points regarding all of this.

and you might be thinking... well, the right wing party must be the ruling party for this to happen! lol no. we are currently under a pretty left-leaning government (this will probably change next month btw, there's general elections on april 28th). this is the government who passed the so-called trans law. and, most importantly, this government exhumated franco's body from his monumental funerary monument to a normal cemetery.

this is the monument in question, btw, it's called valle de los caídos (valley of the fallen) and it was built by the people franco sent to concentration camps throughout the country.

and yes, you read that well. franco's body was here until 2019. the monument was visited (and still is visited) by tons of fascists, who would do the nazi salute, fly the francoist flag, and chant francoist chants. all while the police was just there (but that's no surprise, isn't it). now, those people just go to the new location of franco's tomb.

oh, btw, on april 24th 2023 (4 days ago as i'm writing this post) there was another exhumation in the valley of the fallen (i just found out that since 2022 its name officially changed to 'cuelgamuros valley'. sure), this time of josé antonio primo de rivera, son of the dictator of spain from 1923-1930, and founder of the falange española, a fascist organization that became the only political party during the franco regime (yes. this is the equivalent to the nazi party) that btw still exists as a political party. so that's also lovely. this shouldn't come as a surprise, as la legión española, the military faction most closely allied to franco before, during, and after the civil war, still exists and they parade sometimes. you've probably seen these guys, there's a weird thing where people thirst over them on twitter:

anyways, this all boils down to the continuist nature of fascism in this country. fascist symbols are not banned, and neither is the flag or the hymn. i heard so many times the cara al sol (the francoist anthem) in high school sung by the kids who thought being a fascist was cool. again, franco's body wasn't exhumated until 2019 and with tons of polemics, delays and protests (protests!!!!). primo de rivera's wasn't exhumated until this very year (also with protests). and, meanwhile, there's more than 1000 mass graves still unearthed in spain, most of them filled by republicans who either were killed during the war, or right after it. one of them is the poet federico garcía lorca, considered one of (if not the best) writer in spanish history, and killed for his sexuality in 1936 by francoist soldiers. and, with him, thousands of people have been lost to time. in 2022 (83 years after the war ended) the government opened a 'mass grave searcher' on the ministry website, in order to look if your lost relative had been discovered.

i've talked about this before, but as another example, my great-grand father was unjustly sent to prisioner in 1939 for being a republican. he even spent some years in death row before being released after 5 years. he was officially pardoned by the government in 2017. he died in 1989.

also, something that has been particularly evident during this government, is that fascists are very much alive and have a ton of power. and politicians are either one of them or scared of them. keep in mind that spain has had multiple military and fascist uprisings and coup de états in the 20th century, it's very recent history. that, summed with the terrible job done during the transition period of not divorcing themselves with the francoists or just banning everything to do with them (that 'terrible job' happened because well. there were a lot of fascists there), makes for fascism being painfully present in spain all throughout the 20th and 21st century, so it's always been here, and very obviously so, and that's why it's so fundamentally different from other european regions.

this is what happens when fascists win and fuck up everything. spain is a perfect example of it. i love maps, but everytime i see alternative history maps (and there's a ton of them) that are like 'europe but hitler won ww2' i get the irk because 1) the person making that post is probably a nazi, and 2) that's just what happened in spain. the 'nazis won au' is just 20th century spain. and the consequences of that still ooze to this date. so yeah. that's all i have to say i think.

[hieromonkcharbel]

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom,

Lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

Shouldst lead me on;

I loved to choose and see my path; but now

Lead Thou me on!

I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still

Will lead me on.

O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till

The night is gone,

And with the morn those angel faces smile,

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

St. John H. Newman, C.O.

**********************

"Lead, Kindly Light" was sung by Betsie ten Boom, sister of Corrie ten Boom, and other women as they were led by the S.S. Guards to the concentration camp Ravensbruck during the Holocaust.

Lead, Kindly Light was sung by a soloist, Marion Wright, on the RMS Titanic during a hymn-singing gathering led by Rev. Ernest C. Carter, shortly before the ocean liner struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912.

The hymn was also sung aboard one of the Titanic's lifeboats when the rescue ship Carpathia was sighted the following morning. It was suggested by one of the occupants, Noëlle, Countess of Rothes

[writemarcus]

Beethoven Opera is upgraded to the current prison system

‘Fidelio' wins new set-up with support from Black Lives Matter movement

Ruan Ebright, The New York Times12 May 2018 | 4:00 p.m.

Few opera choirs are as poignant as the group of inmates who sings in the First Act of Beethoven's Fidelio opera . Temporarily released from the cells, the prisoners almost whisper an ode, like a hymn, to freedom: "Oh, what joy to breathe and again and freely in the open air."

The transformation of oppression into freedom lies in the essence of Fidelio , which the small and intrepid Heartbeat Opera Company is performing until May 13 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in Manhattan. There the recorded voices of the choir of the Midwestern prison join in the Beethoven Opera Prisoners' Choir.

To revive the work in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement, Heartbeat's artistic director, Ethan Heard, and artistic director Daniel Schlosberg, set the stage for production within the American criminal justice system, which has sent a disproportionately large number of people to prison. color.

With the opera Fidelio and its competitor Don Giovanni in the #MeToo era, the Heartbeat company continues to follow the same steps as last year's Madame Butterfly , which addresses Asian issues, Orientalism, and culture clichés. geishas Puccini's opera, Heard said in an interview, "is timely and embedded in the current discussions, and I want to find another opera that can do something like this."

He was raptured with Fidelio , whom Beethoven composed after the French Revolution.The opera recounts the efforts of a wife to save her imprisoned husband by mistake, disguising himself as a man and infiltrating the prison. "I thought it was a proper story for 2018," he said.

In the adaptation of the company Heartbeat, the heroine is Leah (Leonore in the original opera), whose husband Stan (Florestan) a naturalized citizen and activist of the Black Lives Matter movement, is arrested during a protest and taken unjustly to prison. Some of the minor opera roles were eliminated, and Schlosberg arranged for Beethoven's score for two pianos, two cellos, two horns and percussion - a camera set that would musically emphasize the story of heroism amidst the tenebrous opera.

It is a version that fits with the increasing efforts in the field of the opera to put experiences and perspectives of the blacks in the center of the stage, as it is the case of Charlie Parker's Yardbird, of Daniel Schnyder; The Summer King , by Daniel Sonenberg, about black basketball player Josh Gibson; Champion , by Terence Blanchard, about a gay boxer, Emile Griffith; and work still under development by Tania Leon, Little Rock Nine.

Musicologist Naomi André, in her upcoming book Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement, describes how operas in the US and South Africa - countries with problematic racism stories - have been used to "offer an alternative narrative of racial experience as opposed to the dominant culture." The power of operas, she writes, "rests on what they offered to their original audience as well as on what they can still offer us in the present day."

There is a historical precedent in the case of the changes made by the Heartbeat company in Fidelio , and their exploration of the political relevance of the opera. Beethoven, a resolute defender of the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, was fascinated by the play of Nicolas Bouilly Léonore, or l'Amour Conjugal , from the time of the Revolution.But the composer's librettist, Joseph Sonnleithner, had to bypass the censorship of the Austrian government, setting the opera in 16th-century Spain and emphasizing the "good wife virtue" rather than civil rights.

Unhappy with the unsuccessful play of the play in 1805, which coincided with Napoleon's occupation of Vienna, Beethoven re-wrote Fidelio the following year, condensing the three acts into two. When he and the poet Georg Friedrich Treitschke revised it again in 1814, to coincide with the Vienna Congress, when European leaders devised a new geopolitical map after the Napoleonic era, the composer added a new final chorus that gave more symbolic weight to the prisoners recently released.

"The fact that the opera has undergone many revisions has given us permission to understand that the music was not so unalterable," Scholsberg said.

Although 19th century audiences saw the opera Fidelio as a fundamentally domestic story, the twentieth-century conductors and directors, beginning with Gustav Mahler and Alfred Roller in 1904, began to present it as a predominantly political allegory. Mahler cut the music from the first act, which he considered inconsequential, and inserted the dramatic Overture No. 3 , Leonore, in the second act, while the stylized, partially abstracted scenery gave the story a timeless universality.

Many productions after World War II were explicitly political, more punctual than timeless. In a critique of Nazi oppression, Fidelio was the chosen work for the reopening of the opera houses of Germany and Austria. And in a divided Germany during the Cold War, directors on both sides of the Iron Curtain transposed Fidelio into scenarios ranging from the Soviet Gulags to South American military juntas and German concentration camps. And they took some liberties in the case of the libretto.

Rejecting Beethoven's spoken dialogue as well as the recitatives sung that became a standard alternative, Wieland Wagner opted for a narrator in his 1954 production in Stuttgart, Germany. Other directors replaced the dialogue with the political verse of the 20th century.

Heartbeat's production also replaced the spoken text. Heard worked with playwright Marcus Scott to turn German dialogue into a contemporary American discourse. (In a scene, Leah begs the prison administrator to briefly free them: "They are people, people who have made mistakes, some whose only mistake is being poor." (She also insinuates that race is a factor).

A Schosberg student organized a choir in the Minnesota prison and put the collaborators in contact with other choirs in Ohio, Iowa and Kansas. In March the team rehearsed with the Oak Community Choir, the Kuji Men's Chorus, the Ubuntu Men's Chorus and the East Hill Singers.

Behind the concrete walls and metal fences they met enthusiastic artists. A member of the Ubuntu choir proudly showed off his tattoo of Johann Sebastian Bach. Video recordings and audio groupings will be put together to create Beethoven's sublime music.

"These choirs have to do with reaching out to humanity through the community. And the directors of these choirs have found a way to nurture the idea that these inmates are people."

He concluded: "And this is what Fidelio is." / Translation Terezinha Martino

[sciogli-lingua]

This was actually harder for me to put together than the French and Spanish ones, as I don’t listen to much “modern” Italian music, and I feel that’s what learners would like to have some advice on. In the end, I mostly went for classics, I hope you can forgive me ;) As usual, the playlist is only half-serious, and I tried to include links to videos featuring both the Italian lyrics and the English translation when I could. Enjoy!

Also in this series: Random music in French | Spanish

Mina – also known as the Tiger of Cremona, she’s been called the greatest Italian singer of all time, so I’d say her songs are definitely worth a listen. Famous titles are Tintarella di luna [x], Se telefonando [x] and Città vuota [x].

Fabrizio De André – probably the most famous Italian songwriter ever, and a crowd favorite for sure. Listen to his works if you’re looking for melancholic tunes and thought-provoking lyrics; I’d recommend Il testamento di Tito [x], La canzone di Marinella [x] and Fiume Sand Creek [x] (but honestly I’d recommend his whole discography and I’ll always be glad to translate his songs if anyone wants me to).

Francesco Guccini – another great songwriter. L’avvelenata [x] is what you want to listen to if you wanna learn some swear words (or if you just need to vent), Canzone per un’amica [x] might kill you inside if you’re like me, and Auschwitz [x] is a powerful but delicate ballad about the death of a boy in a concentration camp.

Mia Martini – one of the most soulful voices in our musical history, who died in the Nineties under circumstances that to this day are still not completely clear, many great lyricists wrote for her. In her repertoire you’ll find hits like Minuetto [x], Almeno tu nell’universo [x] and Piccolo uomo [x].

Lucio Dalla – keeping in line with the Italian songwriting tradition, here’s another household name. Listen to 4/3/1943 [x], Caruso [x] and L’Anno che verrà [x] (here sung in a duet with Francesco De Gregori, yet another singer-songwriter).

Tiziano Ferro – so, here’s an artist that’s still consistently active nowadays (I’m more versed in his earlier songs, though). If you know how to scream-sing at least the chorus of Sere nere [x] you’ll blend among Italians in no time; Non me lo so spiegare [x] is also a classic, as can be said of E fuori è buio [x].

Laura Pausini – possibly one of the best known Italian singers worldwide right now. Her big breakout song, La solitudine [x], is now a cult. Strani amori [x] and Simili [x] are also worth mentioning.

Caparezza – the first rapper on this list! Cool lyrics and quite far from stereotypes, but not the easiest to understand, I’d recommend him (strongly) to more advanced learners. Among his older songs I like best, Vieni a ballare in Puglia [x], Eroe [x] and Legalize the Premier [x].

Elisa – beautiful, melodic voice. Luce [x], Ti vorrei sollevare [x] and Eppure sentire [x].

Rino Gaetano – a voice with a raspy quality to it with which many a generation has fallen in love. Listen to A mano a mano [x], Ma il cielo è sempre più blu [x] and Gianna [x].

Fiorella Mannoia – Quello che le donne non dicono [x] and Il cielo d’Irlanda [x] are old hits of her, a more recent one is Combattente [x].

Jovanotti – funky, alternative hip-hop, pop. Check out Penso positivo [x] (old and upbeat one), Sabato [x], and A te [x] (the song everyone was dedicating to their friend/significant other/cat when it came out).

Baustelle – indie rock group. Personally, I like Gli spietati [x], La guerra è finita [x] and Le rane [x].

Eros Ramazzotti – he was only twenty-one years old when he first competed in the Sanremo festival with Terra Promessa [x]. You can also check out Adesso tu [x] or Più bella cosa [x].

Gianna Nannini – have a look at Fotoromanza [x], Bello e impossibile [x] and Sei nell’anima [x].

Max Gazzè – I almost forgot about him! Witty, generally upbeat and fun (but also interesting) to listen to. La vita com’è [x], Sotto casa [x] and Teresa [x] are cool songs of his.

BONUS – random songs I like (and more)

Alice [x] – we mentioned De Gregori, and this is one of my favorite songs of his (but there are many more! Rimmel, Niente da capire, Generale…).

Per Elisa [x] – singing this one is an artist called Alice, haha. You’ve got to watch the video, she makes the funniest/most badass faces.

La terra dei cachi [x] – by Elio e le storie tese, pretty emblematic as far as the Italian spirit is concerned. Might be a little tough to catch, though.

La bambola [x] – there had to be some Patty Pravo in this. “The girl from the Piper club”, as she was known at the beginning of her career, is a true icon of Italian music.

Ti regalerò una rosa [x] – a touching ballad that won the Sanremo festival in 2007.

Controvento [x] – I’m not the biggest fan of Arisa’s songs, but I really enjoy this one.

Per tutta la vita [x] – I really like Noemi’s voice. Fun fact: she was the soloist in Disney Pixar’s Brave!

Luci a San Siro [x] – melancholic hymn to a lost romance and youth.

Notte prima degli esami [x] – Antonello Venditti making high school seniors emotional since 1984.

Triangolo [x] – the song that comes to every Italian’s mind whenever show writers throw in a daring love triangle.

Il gatto e la volpe [x] – Edoardo Bennato’s take on two well-known character from Pinocchio.

50 special [x] – a classic, you’ll end up singing it to the top of your lungs with your high school friends sooner or later.

Gli anni [x] – basically, same as above (and it’s a rule that has a tendency to be valid for every 883 song).

Monna Lisa [x] – Ivan Graziani in one of his best performances.

Maledetta primavera [x] – come on, it’s called “Damned Springtime” and was covered in way more languages than I thought.

E la luna bussò [x] – sung by Loredana Berté, Mia Martini’s “edgier” younger sister.

…I could go on forever, but here’s a list I made featuring a bunch of songs that marked my childhood [x] (and probably those of many others Italian twenty-somethings).

I also translated I promessi sposi in dieci minuti [x]. You’ll find a thorough explanation of what this is in the link, but let me tell you that this epic mash-up features a lot of Italian hits, albeit with different lyrics, so it’s a great resource! If you want me to, I can write you down a list of songs that appear in it.

as I was making this list, I noticed that @langsandlit had just written a post suggesting many artists definitely worth checking out [x]. Give it a look, it’s really helpful and I agree with what he wrote (plus, there’s a significant section dedicated to contemporary artists).

There’d be many, maaany more (and I might make a second post soon, maybe slightly more concise haha), but that’s it for now!

[veleth95]

Sunguard Site Write Day #22: High Home

The air around the camp was dark after the Sunfury’s last assault on the Alliance at Nethergarde. The Night Elves that they had fought were Azerothians, but these were people they had history with. The heroes who had gone to save their world from the savage planet of the orcs, and miraculously survived until this night when elven steel met dwarven cannon. Not as allies, but as foes.

They had not succeeded easily, either, and the gloom only worsened as the pained cries of injured elves echoed across the dust of Netherstorm. As one of the few Light wielders in the party Veleth was assigned to their care, but there was little he could offer after expending so much energy in the fighting. At most he could chant the old hymns and relieve some pain until the true medics arrived, should they survive that long.

One of his patients rose weakly to speak to him, wincing in pain and forcing the words from their chest. “Blood Knight… I am sorry, but I must ask… Is there anything you know from the High Home?”

The question struck Veleth as odd, his concentration broken. “I apologize, if you can clarify I would be glad to answer.”

“A song, just something to remind us of what we’re here for.” The elf fell back to the ground, dry dirt puffing out at the impact. “Please. If I am to die here, let it be with home in heart…”

Veleth closed his eyes, remembering back to search out something to grant the soldier’s request. He had sung at the temple, and to lull his children to sleep, but it was rare that he sang for the sake of singing. Life as an Ashcaster, as a priest, dictated his attention turn to other matters.

But there was one, a tale of their history. Of the Highborne and their heroes. And so in a low, rich voice Veleth began to sing the Thalassian melody to the elf. He even managed to infuse the words with his will to an extent, carrying faint Light to all those in earshot. The camp quieted, turning to him as he continued. A palpable calm fell over them, and for a moment the nostalgia of it overpowered weariness and ache.

Soon the soldier drifted to sleep, the bleeding could not be stopped and Veleth mourned that he could not do more to help, but he was satisfied that he could grant them peace. It was in short supply on the remains of the orcs’ world, but he mused how even as small a thing as that could bring it to these warriors of Quel’thalas. For now, it was enough.

@thesunguardmg